


Beautiful

by Sjukdom



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: Dark, Dark!Jim, Drabble, Kinky, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-07
Packaged: 2018-04-30 11:59:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5163041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sjukdom/pseuds/Sjukdom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim searched for his ideal of beauty and found it in Oswald.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beautiful

**Author's Note:**

> The epigraph is the lines from the song "Beautiful" by Sopor Aeternus and the Ensemble of Shadows.

_You're in and out of this world... you're beautiful  
Your skin is scarred and you hurt... you're beautiful  
I know that you stand by your word... 'cause you're beautiful_

Beauty ruled in the world, fragile like breath in the frozen air, shattered by every gust of wind. Beauty stared at people from every screen and poster, beauty smiled and its teeth were as white as vampire's fangs. Beauty faded away, ruined by rain and heat, was torn and ripped to pieces by a careless hand. Beauty was like moth, which dropped dead by first signs of upcoming winter. Beauty grew up and died and rotted in the earth, was flown away by rivers to be given back in the form of sticky flesh and soft bones, with eyes eaten away by fish. Beauty burned in the ovens to become ashes. Jim had seen too much beauty going out like that. Was it beauty at all? Did it have to be so uneven, so easily destroyed?

Maybe, only destroyed was the real beauty after all.

Jim had seen murderers and rapists, huge bulks of a man with ragged beards and bad teeth, whose breath smelled of wormy meat and thin hatracks in broken glasses, which they touched nervously with sweaty fingers. Jim had seen hookers with bare gums and beaten bodies, junkies with black veins and heavy drinkers with urine-stained pants and throats sore from vomiting. And every one of them was beautiful. 

A man always seeks his nonpareil, the ultimate embodiment of the beauty he sees. Junkies and hookers were beautiful – their beauty was not to be ruined, because ruin was the other name for this beauty. But something was missing in them, something that would make this beauty sparkle and glow from the inside like a candle inside an empty skull, like pale bodies of maggots in black shredded flesh. Jim admired them, took pictures of them to look at them, when he was home alone and full of unspent lust. But it was not enough. He sought for the icon, for the perfection as beautiful from the inside as from the outside.

He understood immediately that he had found it, when he saw Oswald limping in the street. This limp, so clumsy, so painful, so lovely. Looking at it was like seeing a bird with broken wing that had to walk instead of flying. Oswald's walk seemed like a strange dance, the dance of a hangman in a noose. He saw that glow he looked for so long and he was stunned to discover that Oswald was born this way. The other creatures of grace he had seen became beautiful after years of mutilating their bodies and souls. Oswald seemed to be the brood of this world, seemed to be born out of entangling of forgotten cemeteries and forsaken buildings, seemed to embody every dusty corner and blood stain on the ceiling. He was perfect. 

Jim liked to see him in motion, with his harsh, broken movements, his shoulders waggling, foot twisting, the whole upper-body inclining downwards. Oswald looked like a fantastic creature, like a walking corpse. His paleness was morbid, surreal, it did not belong to the world of living and breathing. His lips were cracked and so was his mind. His hair were black and so was his soul. When Jim undressed Oswald, he bent over his bad leg, slightly thinner than the other, with skin so fine he thought he could see the bone under it. There were no other signs of ailment, but Jim knew that the disease was right there, something that made this leg stumble, like the rust eating up flesh and blood. He caressed the joints, the small toes, slightly twisted and bruised because of the limp, kissed and sucked them and sometimes it was enough for him to come. He enjoyed these small feet touching his cock, squeezing it and stroking it in an unspeakable manner. The skin on them was rough and scored and the feel of it was unbelievable. Everything about Oswald was unbelievable.

His Oswald was perfect in every way. Perfect for him, for this city, as beautiful as the nest of rats, a crippled king of a crippled city. For this world, for the rest of it didn't differ much from the city they were in. All the beauty in it Jim worshipped every time he laid himself next to Oswald, woke up near him and fucked him. All the beauty of the world stared at him from the pitch black holes of Oswald's pupils. All the death, mayhem and pollution, all the hurt and suffering were in them and Jim knew that this beauty, this grace would never go, would never be taken by time.

As long as the world stood as it was.


End file.
